PJ Vogt

She's a food critic for The New Yorker.

And part of her ethos, and this will become important later, is that she considers it part of her job to, quote, eat anything.

You asked your mom a question recently.

Do you remember what the question was?

Why were you wondering about that?

And did you suggest a human head or did he suggest a human head?

And why do you think you were hungry for a human head?

Yeah?

Okay.

Did it seem like Otto still wanted to know or was it kind of like the question had more sticking power for you than it did for him?

I have a friend who says that the truest taboos are the ones whose existence we don't even acknowledge.

It's an idea that we've decided culturally or instinctively is so rotten that it becomes hard to even explain why we don't do it because we don't even talk about why we don't do it.

So Hannah found herself stuck thinking about her son's brush with the cannibalism taboo, even after Otto had moved on.

And she soon found herself poking around on the internet.

The, like, Western explorers in, like, an iron pot and, like, the soups being, like, gradually heated.

And if, like, tomorrow you got a PR blast email that said, like, the people who made the Impossible Burger have figured out how to, like, make a synthetic human steak, like a lab-grown human steak, so you can satisfy your curiosity about human meat without causing human suffering, would you go?

Otto, would you eat human meat if you were allowed to eat human meat?

And if nobody had to get hurt for human meat to be eaten?

And is it because you think it would be tastier because you're curious?

Will you eat things that are like that most people would be scared to eat?